How to Verify Your Paycheck Is Correct

Payroll mistakes happen more often than most people assume — a missed punch, a misapplied overtime rule, or a break that was deducted twice. None of these are usually intentional, but they only get caught if someone checks. Here's a simple process for verifying your own paycheck.

Step 1: Reconstruct your actual hours worked

Before you can check anything, you need your own independent record of when you actually started and finished each shift, and how long your breaks were. Phone records, calendar entries, or your own notes all work. The goal is a record that exists independently of your employer's system.

Step 2: Calculate your expected total hours

Add up worked time for each day, subtracting unpaid breaks, and pay close attention to any overnight shifts where the end time crosses into the next calendar day. This is the step where manual math most often goes wrong, since it's easy to miscount an overnight shift by a full 24 hours if you're not careful.

Step 3: Apply your overtime rule

Once you know your weekly total, separate it into regular and overtime hours using the threshold and multiplier that apply to your job. If you're not sure what threshold or multiplier applies, your employee handbook or HR department can confirm it.

Step 4: Multiply by your hourly rate

Multiply your regular hours by your hourly rate, multiply your overtime hours by your rate times your overtime multiplier, and add the two together. This is your expected gross pay before taxes and deductions.

Step 5: Compare line by line against your pay stub

Your pay stub should show total hours, regular hours, overtime hours, and gross pay separately. Compare each of these line by line against your own numbers rather than just checking the final deposited amount, since a difference in deductions can mask an underlying hours error, and vice versa.

What to do if the numbers don't match

A mismatch doesn't necessarily mean something was done wrong on purpose. Bring your own calculation and your independent time record to your manager or payroll contact, explain the specific day or week where the numbers diverge, and ask them to walk through how their system calculated it. Most discrepancies turn out to be a missed punch, an unapproved overtime rule, or a simple data-entry error that gets corrected quickly once flagged.

Make the math easier on yourself

Reconstructing a week of shifts by hand is the most tedious part of this process. Our work hours calculator lets you enter your start times, end times, and breaks for each day and instantly see your total hours, the regular/overtime split, and an estimated gross pay figure to compare directly against your stub.